We have had to create a few historical game characters for games targeted at kids. Along the way we have acquired some insights that may be useful to others doing the same or similar things.
If your mission, your reason for being in the world—regardless of whether you are a museum, a nonprofit, or a for-profit—is good, then you have no excuse not to market yourself.
Marketing can be the difference between your mission being known and understood, and not. From this perspective, NOT to market is a crime.
The warning label which works contrary to our tendency toward optimism and self-indulgence misses the potential leverage point because the possible event of a future consequence can be set aside, rationalized away, and, most importantly, simply ignored because we (most of us) are biologically wired to pay little attention to such warnings.
The opportunity for fun is at the heart of viral marketing, and what happened with this Romney campaign App COULD be looked at as something more interesting than a few days of online entertainment.
Always knowing that you can easily find out anything you might want to know without actually having to recall it is really quite new. It strongly undercuts the drive to try and store a lot of different things in your head.
Odds are you already deliver on what people need. The trick in museum marketing, as in any kind of consumer marketing, is to think beyond what you do or how you do it, and focus on why your target would want it.
So what do you call this thing that does NOT take massive effort, but has the potential for great positive effect far beyond its seeming capacity?
I think one very good answer to this question was provided in 1972 by Buckminster Fuller when he said the following in an interview ...
The Dutch New-York educational game for kids was created by Tronvig Group for the DiMenna Children's History Museum as part of a suite of educational games.
